Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (42 page)

Further investigation by the NHL revealed that the “voice” belonged to Gallinger. The police also heard Tamer call Taylor, who placed a similar bet. Oddly, despite his wager, Gallinger gave his all during that game and almost single-handedly turned the expected loss into a win. It didn't help him. On March 9, 1948, the league expelled Taylor for “conduct prejudicial to and against the welfare of hockey.” Gallinger, who'd proclaimed his innocence, was also suspended pending further investigation. Eventually, both of them confessed. Taylor accepted his banishment, but Gallinger, only 22 years old at the time, continued to ask for clemency. His pleas fell on deaf ears…until 1970 when the league finally reinstated the pair. The 50-year-old Taylor became a scout for the Washington Capitals, but Gallinger never returned to the NHL.

OPERATION SLAPSHOT HITS THE COYOTES

Gamblers:
New Jersey State Trooper James J. Harney and Phoenix Coyote's assistant coach, Rick Tocchet

Story:
In February 2006, the NHL fell victim to Operation Slapshot, a New Jersey state police investigation of a gambling, money laundering, and conspiracy ring that had processed more than 1,000 bets totaling more than $1.7 million on pro and collegiate sports. The main participants accused of running the ring were New Jersey State Trooper James J. Harney and Phoenix Coyote's assistant coach, Rick Tocchet.

Once upon a time, Tocchet had been a tough, power forward who helped the Philadelphia Flyers reach the Stanley Cup finals in 1985, his rookie year, and come within a game of winning the Cup two years later. After a successful career with six NHL teams, he was coaching the Coyotes as an assistant to Coach Wayne Gretzky when the gambling investigation began.

Downfall:
According to the police, Tocchet and Harney led the ring, based in New Jersey, and placed bets on football and basketball games, but not on hockey. Still, Tocchet's connection to hockey hero Gretzky made for big headlines—especially after police accused Tocchet of placing bets for Gretzky's wife, Janet Jones.

In 2007 Tocchet apologized to the court and the public for his involvement, and pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and gambling promotion. He received two-year probation and no jail time. Tocchet was also suspended from the NHL for three months. He returned to the Coyotes in 2008, and went on to coach the Tampa Bay Lightning.

* * * * *

WELCOME BACK, WINNIPEG!

The city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, had a perfectly serviceable NHL team in the Winnipeg Jets from 1979 until 1996, when the team was yanked away from them to become the Phoenix (Arizona) Coyotes. Well, that crime against hockey has finally been reversed, and, as of the 2011–12 season, the Winnipeg Jets are once again in the NHL. All of us at the BRI wish the city and team a hearty “Welcome back!” and the best of luck in the future.

Most fans will remember the Toronto Maple Leafs' Tie Domi as one thing: a fighter. Turns out there was more to him than meets the (black) eye.

F
IGHTING MACHINE

For Tie Domi, toughness was in his genes. When his father John was escaping his homeland (the totalitarian Albania in the 1950s), he was shot right above the eye. John Domi never had the bullet fragment removed from his skull, keeping it as a reminder of why he moved to Canada. Tie himself was the youngest of three children, and he had to be tough to keep up with his older brother and his friends who played a lot of rough, physical sports. Tie developed into a tenacious hockey player and was eventually drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1988. Despite his relatively modest size—he was listed as 5'10”, but Domi himself admits that's a generous estimate—he soon developed a reputation as a fighter who was willing to drop the gloves with anyone. During a game in 2001, he even took the opportunity to pummel a Flyers' fan in Philadelphia who was unfortunate enough to fall into a penalty box with Domi in it.

By the end of his NHL career, which ended after the 2005–06 season, Domi had accumulated enough time in the penalty box to put him at third overall in the list of all-time NHL penalty minute leaders. But Mr. Domi is not a one-dimensional man.

ANOTHER SIDE OF TIE

Domi was a skilled high school athlete growing up in Windsor, Ontario, so skilled that the University of Michigan athletics department scouted him for both soccer and football. And though he chose hockey in the end, Domi remained active in those other two sports. In the summer of 1995, he played a season with the Canadian International Soccer League, and in 1996 and 1997, he kicked field goals and extra points in preseason games for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

Being an NHL enforcer requires a taste for the spotlight and a flare for the dramatic, and Domi capitalized on these aspects of his personality, appearing in two films in 1999. He played himself in Mystery, Alaska, a hockey comedy starring future Oscar-winner Russell Crowe. Domi also tested his acting chops playing “Pete” in the independent mob movie,
Men of Means
.

In 2009 Domi put his skates back on for the short-lived CBC reality TV series,
Battle of the Blades
(basically, a figure-skating version of
Dancing with the Stars
). Domi was partnered with Canadian national figure-skating pairs champion Christine Hough-Sweeney (an appropriate pairing, considering Hough-Sweeney was nicknamed “Tuffy” for her competitive drive). The duo didn't win the competition, but they did place higher than Canadian ice dancer Kristina Lenko and her partner, Domi's longtime NHL fighting rival Bob Probert.

A FIGHTER…AND A LOVER?

Although his NHL career came to an end in 2006, Domi remained in the media spotlight after his wife Leanne filed for divorce, saying she'd noticed that Tie had taken a more than passing interest in the political career of Belinda Stronach, an auto-parts heiress and Liberal candidate for Member of Parliament. “This was a very big surprise,” Leanne said. “Tie had little to no interest in politics and hadn't the slightest idea about the ideological difference between the candidates.” Neither Stronach nor Domi ever admitted to the alleged affair publicly.

* * * * *

YOU LITTLE THIEVES…

In January 2008, Swedish police issued a public warning to bus travelers: Look out for little people in hockey equipment bags. Police agencies told newspapers that a team of thieves had been putting little people inside hockey bags, which they then put into busses' cargo holds. During transit the little thieves would exit the bags and loot other passengers' luggage.

You won't find this on SportsCenter.

T
HREE YOUNG WOMEN
hopped over the boards and onto the ice during a New York Islanders–Vancouver Canucks game in 1974. They were wearing running shoes, plastic glasses, fake noses…and that's all. They ran around for a while, jumped back into the stands, and headed for an exit. Police said it must have been a carefully planned streaking event, as the women simply vanished after that, most likely into a waiting car.

A WOMAN IN MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO,
was watching a hockey game at a local rink in 2004 when she lifted up her shirt and, according to media reports, “shook her breasts back and forth” at the fans of the opposing team. (She was wearing a bra.) The woman was later banned from attending games at the rink for one year. Bonus: It was a kid's-league hockey game. The players were 11 years old…and one of them was the woman's son.

THE SAN JOSE SHARKS'
Ben Eager was in the penalty box during a 2011 playoff game against the Vancouver Canucks, when a female Canucks fan stood up near the glass surrounding the box, got Eager's attention, smiled at him, lifted her shirt, and pressed her breasts against the glass. CBC cameras happened to be on Eager—and the woman—at the time and stayed there for a full six seconds before finally cutting away. Eager said the next day that he “got a few text messages with the picture after the game.”

IN OCTOBER 2009
police in Boise, Idaho, banned a group of teenage boys from an outdoor ice rink after people complained they were playing hockey naked. The boys confessed that they had been playing “strip hockey.”

DURING A 2002
Boston Bruins–Calgary Flames game, a man climbed over the glass, jumped onto the ice, slipped, fell, hit his head, and was knocked out…while wearing only red socks. The streaker, 21-year-old Timothy Hurlburt, was on the ice for several minutes before being taken off on a stretcher. He was released from the hospital the next day, but later charged with mischief.

When the Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings, it sent a shockwave through the NHL.

I
n the late summer of 1988, life could not have been much better for Wayne Gretzky. The Edmonton Oilers had won their fourth Stanley Cup championship in five seasons and with the hefty list of stars on their roster in the prime years of careers, they appeared likely to add to that achievement. Gretzky's wedding to actress Janet Jones was the highlight of the summer in Alberta and during the playoffs, she had informed No. 99 that he was going to be a father. The Gretzkys were looking for a home in Edmonton.

THE NAIVE ONE

“I figured the Oilers had three or four Cups still to win because we had started as a gang of teenagers in the very early 1980s, climbed to the top four times and everyone on the team was still hungry because we knew how much fun winning was,” Gretzky said. “There had been a bit of guff around the NHL and a little in Edmonton that Janet didn't want to stay in Edmonton but that was absolutely not true. I was four years away from unrestricted free agency and I wanted to be an Oiler at least until then when I could make my own deal to change my career. Janet had agreed to all that. But I guess figuring I would have control over my life was pretty naive.”

L-OIL-TY

The Oilers were a success on the ice and at the gate, playing to capacity crowds (16,239) every night in Northlands Coliseum in a city of 600,000. After four Cups and all the individual awards the team had won, the payroll was becoming a challenge for owner Peter Pocklington and GM-coach Glen Sather. Several of the team's stars knew there were greener pastures in bigger markets but there was a great deal of loyalty to the Oilers—the team that
gave them a chance, the team where Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Paul Coffey, Glenn Anderson, Grant Fuhr, Kevin Lowe and Esa Tikkanen had become stars. The big money in other cities was inviting but the chance to add to their winning mark with the freewheeling fun-to-play hockey style was a big lure, at least until they knew the team had run its championship course.

THE WOES OF POOR PETER PUCK

But while the Oilers were doing good business, owner Pocklington's other businesses (oil, meat packing, land development, trust company, car dealerships) were encountering trouble, and he needed an infusion of capital to keep his empire afloat. His expensive art collection had been sold and the Oilers were used as collateral for a loan. A year earlier, Gretzky had signed a personal services contract with Pocklington when the Oilers owner was thinking of turning the team into a public company as a way to raise cash for his other businesses. The plan was to make Gretzky part of the team. “It turned out that Janet, my father and my agent Mike Barnett had known all through the playoffs about Pocklington having discussions with several teams about a deal for me that would include a lot of cash. But they didn't tell me because they knew I was zeroed in on the playoffs and they knew I wanted no distractions.”

HONEYMOON INTERRUPTED

Gretzky and Janet were on their honeymoon in Los Angeles when he received a call from Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall, a flashy Californian who was regarded as a genius for amassing a fortune dealing in antique coins. McNall said that he had the Oilers' permission to talk to him about a contract that would follow a deal. “It was slap in the face not to have the Oilers tell me about the whole matter,” Gretzky said. “But when I thought about it, I realized that if I was going to be traded, L.A. was good because it would mean Janet could pick up her acting career again.”

GRETZ HELPS NEGOTIATE TRADE OF HIMSELF

McNall said he would pay $20 million plus three first-round draft picks and two players for Gretzky and two or three players. “I told him one of the other guys had to be Marty McSorley,” Gretzky
recalled. “The Kings had been a bad team, one without much grit, and McSorley was one of the toughest guys in the NHL. I actually was in McNall's office when Pocklington called him and Bruce said McSorley had to be one of the players. I told McNall to tell him if Marty wasn't in the deal, I wouldn't report to the Kings.” The deal finally was hammered out. Gretzky, McSorley, and forward Mike Krushelnyski would go to the Kings in exchange for three draft picks, young forwards Jimmy Carson and Martin Gelinas, and $15 million. The trade could not be announced for two weeks because the Oilers were staging their season ticket drive and word of No. 99's departure would hurt that.

WHAT HEART?

A reporter in Quebec where Gretzky had owned the Hull Olympiques junior team somehow grabbed the scoop on what most call the biggest deal in NHL history in a story on August 8. The next day, Gretzky flew to Edmonton where a press conference was held in which Pocklington wanted Gretzky to say the trade was his idea but Gretzky refused. On the nationally televised conference, Pockington talked of his “heavy heart” that he had when granting Gretzky's request to leave the Oilers. “What do you do when an outstanding, loyal employee approaches you and asks for an opportunity to move along?” Pocklington said. “You know you don't want to lose him but at the same time, you don't want to stop him from pursuing his dreams.”